


Wipeout!

by fourshoesfrank



Series: estatement fics ;)) [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Birds, Florida, Gen, Inspired by Beowulf, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), lol, the Everglades
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28144041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: Statement of Tamara Testa, regarding the wildlife in the Everglades National Park in America.
Relationships: original character & her dad
Series: estatement fics ;)) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1711783
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Wipeout!

Statement of Tamara Testa, regarding the wildlife in the Everglades National Park in America. Statement given on the 22nd of November, 2011. Statement begins. 

I’m not a huge fan of meat. I was raised vegetarian, mostly because my mom was allergic to beef and partly because my dad is one of those devout Catholics who doesn’t eat meat on Fridays, and Friday was the one day of the week that we always managed to cook our own dinner instead of reheating frozen food or getting takeout. 

Despite being allergic to beef, my mother was a waitress at one of those shitty hamburger places that serves  _extremely_ questionable meat, the kind of place that has boxes of meat labeled ‘Grade D (edible)’. She hated it, but it paid a ridiculous amount of money. The owner probably had his hands in a few dirty places, but my mom didn’t want to know anything about it. I’m with her on that. 

We lived in St. Augustine, Florida. It’s one of those cities where tourists pronounce everything wrong, even the name of the city itself. It’s Saint Uh-gust-in, not Awg-uh-steen. Tourists do a lot of shitty things, but that’s the one detail that’s always annoyed me. I mean, littering and starting fights and taking obnoxious vacation pictures is a whole other thing, because once they leave, it’s over. They can’t take that with them. But they’ll keep pronouncing St. Augustine wrong even after they’re not  _in_ St. Augustine anymore. It drives me up the wall. 

That’s off topic, I’m sorry. I’m probably trying to delay the inevitable, where I write out what happened to me. I don’t like thinking about it. Gives me goosebumps all over when I think about it, even thought it was really warm when it happened. Maybe I’m just cold because I’m in England now. Who knows?

Okay. So, like I said, my mom was a waitress and my dad was a preschool teacher. Wait, I haven’t said what my dad did—oh, forget it. Those were their jobs and my dad’s job isn’t important anyway. 

My mom died in the spring. She went out peacefully, in her sleep. The doctor—or maybe the mortician, I don’t really know what his exact job was, I just know what he told me—said that her heart just gave up. He told me it had been painless, and I believed him. I’ve looked it up online and it seems like he was right; he wasn’t just trying to make me feel better. I tried to tell that to my dad when I got home, but he was too zoned out. He stayed like that, detached and unresponsive, for about a month. I made all the funeral arrangements and the casket arrangements and the memorial service arrangements and... I don’t even know what other kind of stuff I had to do but I did all of it. I made so many calls that my cell data ran over and I had to go to the last place in person instead of doing it by phone. I did it all. 

I don’t blame my dad for being so withdrawn. If my wife had died, I’d probably do the same thing. I kind of blame myself for not being there for him more, to be honest. Maybe if we’d fixed things at home, in St. Augustine, we wouldn’t have felt like we needed to go on vacation. But, as it was, we both decided that we needed a break, so in May we both packed for a week-long stay in a hotel and we drove to Miami. 

For the first few days, we just went around the city, seeing the sights and whatnot. On the fourth day, we had lunch with one of my friends from college who had moved down there for work a couple years back—his name's Brock Pierson, if you want to look him up—and he told us that his cousin—Frankie Pierson, Jr—could get us a discounted boat tour of the Everglades since she worked in that business. My dad and I agreed, and Brock promised to text me when Frankie had arranged it. 

Later that day, I was alone in the hotel room watching something mindless on the TV, and my dad was downstairs, sleeping beside the hotel's overly chlorinated pool, no doubt with a half-finished book lying open on his chest. My phone's text pinged. It was Brock, letting me know that Frankie had managed to talk someone into giving us a discounted boat ride. 

Brock also wanted to know if I wanted to check out a new hamburger place that sold crocodile meat as well as regular beef patties. He said it sounded interesting, and the croc meat supposedly tasted like chicken. I agreed, and left the hotel to meet him there. After all, my mom wasn't around to tell me no anymore.

I don't remember the restaurant's name, but on the side of the building someone had painted a garishly bright cartoon of an alligator—not a crocodile—wearing a chef's hat with neon pink lipstick on the front of its snout. To call the place a restaurant at all was a bit of a stretch. The small concrete-and-plywood building couldn't have been more than fifty square feet, and the seating area only compromised about half of that space. The kitchen took up most of the other half, and a garage for the owner's golf cart was crammed into what space had been left over. Seriously, you could see the owner's golf cart just sitting in the corner, painted the same eye-straining pink as the lips of the gator outside. 

Brock seemed unphased by the low-budget look of the place, and he smiled at me as we ordered, received our food, and took it to a table at the back, close to the small windows. These unevenly-paned monstrosities were covered in old advertisements and the contact information for at least five different real estate agencies, which the restaurant either hadn't gotten around to cleaning or simply didn't intend to remove at all. Judging by the dates on some of the papers, it seemed like the latter was true. 

I had my misgivings, sure, but Brock was always a good judge of character back in college, so I figured he probably knew something about the place that I didn't. And I will say, the crocodile meat sandwich—it wasn't really a burger, it was just a sandwich with mustard and tomatoes on it—tasted pretty good. I liked it. 

When I got back to the hotel, I found my father crying in the bathroom. He told me it was just a normal spell of grief, nothing too bad, and I believed him. We didn't talk about it that night, and in the morning, he said I should just go on the boat ride without him. He'd find something to watch on TV while I was gone. 

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when I first stepped out of the hotel. You need to understand, _everything_ was normal until I got on that boat ride. Well, everything was normal except for the weird crocodile meat place, but honestly, that's just Florida. I think even you British people know about Florida, right? Anyway, the point is, I didn't feel any kind of creeping dread or sense of impending doom like people always say they do in those artsy horror movies. I worried a little about my dad, but that was old news at this point. I felt fine. 

Frankie Pierson, Jr, happened to be the pilot of the Everglades boat ride. I could see why getting a discount had been so easy; the watercraft was a frankenboat made of algae-crusted wood, surprisingly shiny metal siding, and cloudy plexiglass. As I stepped onto the boat, that fabled feeling of unease began to overtake me. There was only one other passenger, a bespectacled old woman who probably just wanted a cheap getaway from the retirement home for a few hours. I didn't say a word to her as she got on. 

Frankie warned the two of us that a storm the other week had clogged the water with floating logs, so the ride might be a little bumpy. The old woman and I said that was alright, and I privately thought that the ride would have been bumpy anyway, given how old the boat's motor looked. And sure enough, less than a minute after leaving the dock, I began to hear waterlogged wood colliding with the metal of the craft's nose. The sound reminded me of chewing wet, expired cereal, with the occasional crunchy piece mixed in. Not very pleasant. 

The old woman sighed and stared out the plexiglass windows, clearly hoping to lose herself in the natural beauty of the place. Well, I don't know if she succeeded, since the swampy area around us didn't look that beautiful to me, but she seemed to enjoy it. I counted the number of logs that we hit and tried to force myself to enjoy this—after all, I  _had_ gotten a discount. 

Throughout all of this, I still felt a little uneasy, but I told myself I was just skeptical of the boat's integrity. To be fair, it looked pretty old, possibly the same age as my fellow passenger. But as we entered a wider stretch of open water, and the number of logs decreased, I still felt just as on edge as before. The boat now glided smoothly along, the only bumps coming from coughs and stutters in the motor. I still couldn't relax. I kept thinking I heard distant voices coming from deeper into the swamp, but neither Frankie nor the old woman seemed to hear them. 

After a long time, maybe thirty minutes, the waterway narrowed again and the  clunk of logs hitting the boat drowned out the voices. I should have been relieved, but I wasn't. And sure enough, the indistinct cacophony rose up again, drowning out almost all the surrounding noises. 

I still couldn't see anyone else except for Frankie and the old woman, but those were definitely human voices. I know what I heard, and I know what I didn't hear... This is the part where everyone tells me I lost it. My story's been pretty believable up until this point, wouldn't you say? 

Anyways, the point is: I  _did_ hear a bunch of people talking. I  _didn't_ hear any birds. Not one single chirp or peep or caw or whatever sounds the birds in the Everglades make. I heard them talking. 

The things they said... The Everglades sounded like a baseball stadium, full of voices cheering and booing and trying to predict what'll happen to the players—we were the players in this case, the three of us in our little boat. The birds kept making guesses,  _bets_ _,_ on whether each log would be the one that finally dented the hull and sank us. They sounded excited, like they were watching Wipeout or something. I know one thing for sure: I will never sign up to be a contestant on that show, never in my life. I doubt human spectators would be much better than their avian counterparts. The sounds get into your brain and rattle in your chest and you can't even think because all you can hear is "Ooh, they're gonna get swamped.... Oh, oh! Twenty bucks says they'll tip over on that bend!" 

The other two people didn't even hear the birds, so I must've looked like I was losing my mind in the middle of a perfectly mediocre sightseeing tour, but I don't care. I haven't spoken to Frankie Pierson since I thanked her for the ride, and the old woman doesn't even know my name. The birds knew hers, though. 

Needless to say, I cut our vacation short right after I went back to the hotel. My dad was fine with that. On the way home, I drove with the radio cranked up so loud I almost couldn't hear an ambulance's sirens as it passed me. 

You're probably reading this and wondering why I bothered to go into the weird restaurant at all, if my actual Statement thing just entails the birds. Well, I'm not sure why I put that in there either, but it feels right. I hope it helps you people figure out what happened to me on that boat ride. 

**Author's Note:**

> in case you're not familiar with Beowulf, at one point in the story a character ingests some dragon blood and is able to hear the speech of birds. i stretched that a little, made the dragon a croc, y'know. this was fun. reading comments is also fun, so you could leave some


End file.
